Wired's five highlights from the 2011 Red Innova tech conference

As rain fell in London, Wired was fortunate to be heading to the
Red Innova conference in
Madrid where an energetic gathering of thought leaders, developers,
bloggers, investors and entrepreneurs met in the heart of the
Spanish capital for two days of talks on the digital landscape in
Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Here are five highlights from
the conference.

Phil Libin

The CEO of Evernote -- the platform that allows people to gather and
store personal information such as notes, web clippings, audio and
video -- offered entrepreneurs an inspiring talk about why it's the
best time ever to build a tech company. He used the example of
Evernote Peek -- an education product that was conceived, market
researched, and built in just three and a half weeks yet became the
number one education app on the Apple Store -- as a way of
demonstrating that someone with a bright idea can bring it to
market quickly and cost effectively using cloud services, open
source infrastructure, social media, freemium
economicsand the Apple Store.

Libin also floated the notion that we are at the beginning of a
process of moving from an economy based on scarcity or knowledge to
one that's based on love: that the value of products or services
will be based on the level of passion consumers feel about them. In
the cloud age, perceived value increases over time.

The example he employed, naturally, was Evernote: if you use it
to store your memories it will be more valuable to you in ten years
compared to now. For Libin, when he's looking at his company data,
it's more important that his customers stay with Evernote than that
they switch to a premium service, because every month a customer
continues to use the product the more likely he or she is to fall
in love with it and sign up for premium services in the long
run.

Luke Williams

A former creative director (now fellow) at Frog design, Williams
teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business. His book,
Disrupt, argues that businesses and individuals should
abandon the notion of competition through minor differentiation and
embrace the notion of deep, meaningful change. Williams insists
that it's outsiders and smaller businesses -- especially startups -- that
are able to truly innovate, as they're not creatively stymied by
repeating learned behaviours.

He used this example
-- a trailer for the movie The Shining that's been
reimagined as a romantic comedy ­-- to demonstrate how fresh,
creative thinking can completely disrupt expectations. (Sadly: this
will only make sense if you've seen The Shining...) The
lesson: businesses are relying on prediction -- basic assumptions
about products and services -- rather than provocation, which is
more likely to give rise to cause significant change.

Williams' final advice was that every business should set up a
team specifically to challenge its current products and services as
if it was a startup. "Attack your own business model," Williams
advises. "Before someone else does it."

Brazil

A joint presentation by entrepreneur Bob Wollheim and Bia Granja
from YouPIX, a photo management platform, gave an overview of
the Brazilian youth
market. According to Wollheim, 47 percent of people working in
Brazil can be classified as Generation Y, meaning that they were born after the
mid-eighties. Broadly speaking they share the same characteristics
as their western counterparts: they're looking for meaning in their
lives/work, they think of themselves as "green", they're fully
digital, they care about the balance between work and leisure, and
they've been brought up to have "options": their parents told them
to pursue a course in life that made them happy, although having
numerous paths to follow can mean that, often, they are unable to
commit to a single course.

According to ComScore, Brazil's 76 million internet users has
the largest online population in South America. Wollheim and Granja
offered a snapshot of a country that's highly digitally engaged.
According to the pair, the Google-owned social networking site
Orkut has 53 million members in Brazil, a country that's extremely
keen on vlogging: three billion online videos are viewed per
month.

In a later presentation, Romero Rodrigues -- a veteran of
"Brasilicon Valley" and co-founder, and president of BuscaPé.com, a comparison
shopping platform -- argued that, although the VC industry in
Brazil is still nascent, there is a significant opportunity for
new, non-traditional businesses: the market is dominated by
copycats, so there's enormous room for innovation. The challenge
for Brazilian entrepreneurs is to gain funding: seed investors
usually look for a US benchmark -- meaning an idea that's been
successful elsewhere -- before making a commitment.